Can someone Clarify who the Chinese Overlords are that own Riot and what influence do they have...

A chinese company, Tencent, owns Riot Games.

Tencent owns a majority holding in Riot Games and, if interviews are to be believed, they actually don't really influence the game much at all.
I think the official reasoning was "We'll buy the majority now so that you can keep doing what you're doing. Other people might mess it up." Or something like that.

it presumably had the effect of removing all human bones from the game (a while ago when they redid the icons for vamp scepter, abyssal scepter and DFG), karthus and sion visual updates